Penillion of the Iron Ore Eaters
For the Yindjibarndi People and all other peoples who are or have been or will be driven from their land by the rapacious miners of the Pilbara.
It’s an eating
And a shitting
Analogy?
A synergy
Of compulsion
And revulsion?
Feeding nation/
nation feeding.
Those billionaires
Work the figures:
Divide, conquer/
Coffins, coffers.
Red ore engorged,
Flowers blooded,
Wild contusion
Styled transfusion;
The vast ‘donor’
Left hollow or
Gasping for breath:
Smelters are stealth
Out where the sky
Is primary.
The bands, the seams,
Layers of dreams:
Laws of plosion
Exploration,
Peg-claim: purvey
voyeurs’ surveys
A deletion,
Or extinction
A tenement
As testament?
Miners’ terror:
Stygofauna.
But not the ‘law’
They can pay for.
They eat bodies.
They shit corpses.
Acacias.
Budgerigars.
by John Kinsella
First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on February 18, 2012
Those billionaires
Work the figures:
Divide, conquer/
Coffins, coffers.
Thank you for this poem John, it says many of the things I feel. It is almost unbelievable andrew forrest, who says he loves the Aboriginal people, can then turn around and destroy sacred sites,burial grounds. Community and Culture.